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Week 4 – Failure and How I Blew Up

Making this post is very hard for me.

Last night while I was working furiously to wrap up this week’s project something went wrong. Around 11pm I noticed that my Android Emulator in Eclipse wasn’t starting up and I couldn’t test my game. I then started exporting my game onto my phone to test it there and it wouldn’t run. At this point I figured I had messed up my code somewhere for the Android deployment. But none of my previous week’s projects would run in Eclipse now. None of them. And I lost it. I became rage incarnate. This was not the correct thing to do.

My mind was racing. I had one hour until my midnight deadline to solve this problem and I couldn’t think straight. My stomach felt sick and I just wanted to scream every curse I had ever heard. This, of course, didn’t help the situation and it became a downward spiral of anger and that anger clouding my ability to fix the problem.

I didn’t want to fail. I didn’t want to lose. I wanted to succeed and I felt helpless. This week was feeling like my best one yet. I had been so proud about how I was coming along this year. I couldn’t accept failure. I wouldn’t accept failure. I want to succeed.

Ultimately, 3am came around and I was still no closer to solving my issue. None of my projects will launch in Android. By this time I had given up putting the last little bit of functionality in my game and sat defeated with my the side of my face on my laptop. I wasn’t just dead tired, I was dead. Consumed with failure. I didn’t know how to lift my head up from there and continue. With my head turned into a paperweight on the keyboard I calmed down and proceeded to collect my thoughts. I took a deep breath and said out loud the most painful thing I imagine I could have heard, “I failed”. I accepted it.

I remembered that part of this year long project is to not only learn how to succeed but to not be afraid of failure. Do not let failure bring you down. It’s a tough lesson. I would be lying if I said I thought that I learned it fully. I’m still pretty upset, but I’m not discouraged. I still plan to continue forward with Week 5 once I can get my IDE working again. Hopefully that’s soon. Once I am able to get everything running again I will be uploading what I had finished from this week in another post update as a record of what I made.